Tom Pimental : Web Creative

As I’ve stated here several times before there are good and bad SEO practices. The good people at Datadial have put together an infographic that highlights SEO best practices and the “blackhat” techniques you should avoid at all costs.

Click the image below to see the full graphic.

So in case you couldn’t tell by the last 4 posts, I was pretty busy in March/April. In addition to launching 4 new sites, I also found a new job. Leaving IDG was difficult—5+ years of history and an incredible group of people made the decision to leave very difficult, but I was ready for a change of scenery (and business model).

Care.com is a 4 year-old startup based in Waltham, MA that’s taking the care needs world by storm :). Whether looking for a baby sitter, pet sitter, elderly care or a housekeeper (and more), Care.com can really help. I’ve already used the site to find a housekeeper to come in twice a month and help around the house. They’re much more affordable than you think!

Hancock Builders was one of my first clients and I’m proud to say we’re still working together.

The most recent update was entirely focused on conversion. Converting customers, whether organic or search engine driven, is priority number one for any business and Hancock was ready to embrace the compromises required to take this step. Focusing on Hancock’s services and past work was key to leverage the SEO and conversion efforts with a useful and informational website.

The new site launched in late April and has already seen an up-tick in quote requests, which should increase now that the new site has launched.

Jessica Doherty likes to redesign her website almost as much as I do. This latest release puts her on her 4th custom design. While Jess primarily drove the design this time around, we added some interesting new features including music, a slideshow gallery and a reorganized gallery structure which now includes a very cool “Trash the Dress” section where women revisit their wedding gowns in odd and interesting places.

We actually removed WordPress from the new site, because Jess wasn’t updating it often enough. However, we did focus on some basic SEO features including better title and description tags, breadcrumbs and a sitemap.

Jess is happy with the site, but don’t be surprised if I announce another redesign within the next 12 months.

Another day, another launch :)

Well, technically, McGourty launched back in early April 2010. McGourty Company was new to the web and needed to stake a claim. We focused on a clean design with basic SEO (search engine optimization) elements that would help surface the 20+ year-old general contractor in local search results.

We focused on highlighting McGourty’s services and past work through an interactive photo gallery. The site includes a custom “Request a Quote” form with strong calls to action throughout the site to drive people to contact the company.

I technically launched NikkiDevaux.com back in March, but haven’t had a chance to comment on it. Nikki is a Realtor based in Massachusetts who had a website through a company offering templated sites to real estate professionals. For Nikki, the site lacked originality and did not offer her the flexibility she was looking for. We identified WordPress as an excellent base for her new site, sprinkled on a solid custom template and even threw in a blog, newsletter, contact form and full MLS search.

Nikki is extremely happy with her new site and blogs regularly. She even has the ability to edit her sidebar “Concierge” section where she highlights other professionals she trusts.

Once again, Google confirms they do not use the keywords meta tag. They also reinforce the fact that if you write good/useful (read: not keyword injected) description meta tags, they will use it in search results.

In my last post (“SEO: A Cautionary Tale“) I pointed out questionable tactics that some “SEO Experts” employ. However, there are some best practices that make your site easier to index and most of them can be done by you, free of charge.

1) Create a Google Webmaster Account: Use Google’s free webmaster tools to optimize your site’s searchability. You can also use this tool to submit a sitemap (a list of all the pages on your site) which ensures search engines have access to all of your content. Don’t forget about Bing’s and Yahoo’s webmaster tools too.

2) Sign up for Google Local Business: If you’re a local business, the major search engines now offer enhanced business listings (often for free) which appear at the top of local search results. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have these types of listings and you should make sure your company is listed with them.

3) Read Google’s SEO Starter Guide: This is an incredible resource, directly from Google, which details the various web design/layout techniques including URL patters, header tags, unique titles and meta descriptions, etc that help Google index your site.

4) Write good content and make your website useful: There’s no substitute for simply making a good, useful website. If you make a website that people enjoy, they will reward you with quality links which will eventually lead to your site being listed where it belongs in Google.

When it comes to your search engine rankings you need to be honest with yourself. Do a search for your most sought after keyword for your business and there are likely millions of results. Now add a state or even a city to that term and there are still probably 10s of thousands of results. Anyone making promises that they can get you to the top of these lists are likely full of it, but the tactics above should at least setup you site so it can be crawled effectively by search engines.

Having spent the better part of my professional career in online media, I’m acutely aware of the seduction of SEO. Countless unsolicited emails have graced my inbox touting higher rankings, mounds of traffic and never-ending revenue. But time after time, the only things that ever seem to work are good content, good layouts and quality external links—all things “SEO experts” cannot deliver.

Google’s own SEO Starter Guide states, “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.” What does this mean? Simply write content for your audience, not search engines, and Google will find you because people will notice your high quality content, products and services and link to them from their Facebook, Twitter and blog pages.

So the next time you receive an unsolicited email from a self-proclaimed “SEO Expert” keep an eye out for these scam warning signs:

1) Promises of increased rankings: No one, except a developer at Google or other search engine, has the power to physically better your search ranking. If someone makes this promise, get it in writing and get a good lawyer.

2) Any references to increasing your external links: External links should be earned, not bought/scammed. Anyone can go out and spam forums and blog comments to artificially increase your external link counts. You’d be better off spending your money on graffiti artists to spray paint your URL on a bridge as Google looks at the quality and context of the link to your page over the volume of them.

3) Keyword optimization: Keyword stuffing is one of the worst things you can do. Don’t force keywords into your meta data and site copy in the hopes of attracting searchers, because if your site is solely optimized for search engines, you’ll leave your users confused and clicking the back button to get to your competitor’s search listing.

4) Your description or keywords meta tag are not “optimized”: “SEO Experts” love to use free tools to “analyze” your site’s “search friendliness” and use those official-looking reports to scare you into doing business with them. Google’s own Matt Cutts has stated that Google does not use the keywords meta tag. Description tags are important, but again they should follow the rule of “write good content” and avoid reusing too many of the same keywords.

5) Quick turnarounds: Changes you make to your site can take 6 months or more to propagate through search results. If anyone is touting a quick fix, they’re probably doing things like keyword stuffing, link baiting, etc, which Google will eventually penalize you for.

6) External links: It’s no secret that external links (links on other sites to your site) play a big role in how well your site ranks. However, these links should be obtained over time by writing good content, providing exceptional service and generally having a useful website. Some firms will plaster your site all over forums and fake directories, but when it comes to links, quality always trumps quantity.

Take it from me, one small business owner to another, SEO can be a silver bullet, but Google owns the gun that fires it.

Despite the fact that I built Pamela Ferdinand’s first site nearly 7 years ago, the design still works, but the functionality was seriously lacking. Pamela wanted to add a blog and promote her upcoming book, “Three Wishes: Our True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood“. A static, 7-year old site wasn’t going to cut it.

Heavily leveraging the original design and sprinkling in some WordPress magic worked like a charm. The design stayed consistent for past visitors, but adding WordPress gave Pamela the flexibility to easily manage multiple content types/categories (Blogs and Articles) and the freedom to make updates and additions to her site whenever she feels the need. Add in a simple, yet compelling Flash intro by my friends at Overthink Designs and this site was a perfect match to Pamela’s needs.